I'm currently looking into replacing our Backup Exec software with either of the solutions above. We only have around 2 TB of data, so the smallest appliance from each vendor should be fine. Does anyone have experience using either or both of these solutions for backup and/or DR? Any little known features that boost one ahead of the other? Any other recommendations are also appreciated.

Primarily protecting our accounting software which lies on top of a SQL database. Other things would include shared files and our directory. - Again, these are all applications that we can easily protect.

All of the above would be nice. Instant recovery would be a plus in case of a failure, and to my understanding is provided by Unitrends. - Instant recovery of VMware, Hyper-V & Windows clients comes standard for all of our paid editions, so you're set there as well.

Planning on replicating to cloud storage for now and potentially expanding with another unit in a separate location. - We allow you to replicate to the public cloud of your choice, a second location, or to the Unitrends Cloud. Unitrends Cloud customers can also spin up their clients in our cloud as part of our Disaster Recovery as a Service offering.

There are a few advantages to Unitrends over EMC including US based support, the flexibility to deploy Unitrends as a physical appliance or a virtual appliance, meaning that you provide the storage, and our DR options. Our deployment options gives you flexibility if your data ever grows exponentially, and you need to expand your storage, and allows you to build the solution that meets your specific needs. Please let me know what questions you may have.

Ill give a +1 to Unitrends, we have had the 814S at each of our sites that cross replicate to one another, as well as a 3rd VM appliance that we use in our test environment that have worked out very well for us. I do monthly test with different machines as a test to verify backups and DR scenarios. We have a few more machines than you but at your size it should work fine.

Another option you may want to look at for your size is Datto, we used to use it at another office and it worked out really well. You will also see some recommendations for Veeam, great software but not always a fit for some organizations needs.

Ryan - Quite honestly, about 2 years ago, our support organization was going through a rough patch. We have worked very hard for the last 24 months to resolve these issues, and currently maintain a 98% customer satisfaction rating, which is from a survey that goes out to each customer after their support case has been closed. We have also won numerous awards for our customer support, including Stevies for the last few years. Please let me know what questions you may have about this.

I am almost up for renewal on all 3 of our appliances and will be going through that renewal process in the coming months. As far as support goes, every time I have called in I have worked with someone who was knowledgeable with one exception where after 20 minutes I said I wasn't comfortable with him in my box and requested to be escalated and was given someone new. I do regularly test my backups and did have one time where I ran into an issue that support said it was better to start over/rebuild, which was fine as it was test data but this is why testing backups is important, you will hear the techs say they almost never have people call in when testing recoveries.

Ryan - I'm happy that I could help. We're all glad that our support team was able to shape things up so that we were back to delighting our customers a few years ago. Since our engineers are human, as our customers, we know that we may never hit 100% customer satisfaction, however, it is our goal.

If you have the option to think outside the aforementioned solutions you might give some thought to NEC's Hydrastor.

To be open and honest, I do work for NEC but thought I might just share with you an option to round out your consideration.

The NEC Hydrastor solution provides you a long term solution that can grow with your applications in your ecosystem without the need to have revisit the fork-lift upgrade down the road when you are ready to expand.